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One only needs to look at Netflix, Uber and Nest to find examples of new models that are disrupting traditional industries or sectors. One industry that has already seen one cycle of disruption is the freelancer space - solutions like Mechanical Turk, sites like Freelancer.com and channels like Craigslist have all helped make it easier for organizations to find freelancers for specific roles or projects. But all of these solutions are standalone sites that are disconnected from the actual work that freelancers do - sure Freelancer is a great place to find a designer to create a website, but for organizations that run their workflow through web applications, it's a jarring departure from the integrated norm that they're used to.

A new startup is aiming to change all that. MyCrowd, a very young company currently at seed round stage was founded last year with the aim to integrate talent acquisition with commonly used productivity platforms. The company is formally launching today and is rolling out integrations with Asana and Basecamp that allow users of those systems to request freelance workers from within those applications themselves. These integrations join ones with PowerPoint, Optimizely and Google Docs - and it seems there's a real demand for better freelancing tools, surveys show a 700% growth in online freelancing tasks since 2008.

The value proposition here is fairly sound - if I'm a web design company for example, it's likely that I have the workflow for a website design project within my project management solution - having to essentially cut and paste much of this information within an external site when finding a freelancer is a pretty inefficient approach MyCrowd undoubtedly make the procurement part of the process more efficient.

But there are caveats to that - the reason for the growth of sites like freelancer.com is that people like to be able to research a freelancer. People want to see samples of the freelancer's work, read what other people have said about them and see the sort of clients they work for. Buy trying to automate this process MyCrowd risks turning those off who want more control over the process. There are also some questions when it comes to the common situation of wanting several proposals about a piece of work - the beauty of freelancer, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, is that it abstracts the actual work away from the procurement process - it leaves room for human intervention, gut feel and flexibility.

Concerns notwithstanding, MyCrowd is an interesting look at how new startups are leveraging the open architecture of new-style applications to build offerings that, rather than sitting on top of the host product, actually add functionality within the application itself.